I appreciate the response, and I understand your concern on needing to consider the different possibilities before making a change right away. I'll keep an eye out for your future post when you make a final decision. Thanks!

Just another thought, this could help simplify things with the "At least 106 out of 108 holes must be finished (You are allowed to overstroke or run out of time twice)" rule. "98%" (effectively) is a strange category, would it be a bonus if the category could just become a 100% category, if players didn't have to worry about skipping over holes because of stroke limit or time limit.

I know the rule is supposed to kill less runs, but even if you are a pro, and can do every course perfectly, first try, spamming the R key 12 times will likely be faster than at least 2 of the courses, so if you want world record, you might actually want to intentionally throw away 2 holes, right?

I'd 100% support no stroke limits requirements in the rules and no max time limits in the rules, I consider it a very obvious choice honestly.

"My theory: Increasing the stroke count (say to 99) would lead to more risky strats being used and constantly resetting the hole. Personally I don't think this is healthy for the game and not fun."

More risky strats is kind of a big part of speedrunning in general. There are loads of games where your run is dead if you miss pixel perfect tricks, that's essentially the nature of the beast of spedrunning. If you find a trick unfun you can just not include it in your runs, not every time you play do you have to go for world record... world records are always inconsistent inherently, the WR record holder for any given game doesn't consistently get that WR time when they sit down and play, as perfection is a matter of luck sometimes.

And allowing hard tricks encourages more research into new tricks in general, which is one of the big parts of speedrunning.

I consider it very not in the spirit of things to have a rule that's stated intention is to discourage trying out the "optimal" strategy for speed (hard tricks). There are multiple games where some strats are so tight, that 3 or less people in the WORLD have ever managed to do them outside of a TAS. They don't ban the strategy just because it's inconsistent. And they don't disqualify the runs because they had to retry their setup multiple times to get it right in game.

Speaking of unfun, hitting the 12 stroke limit after getting off rhythm is very unfun itself too. For a lot of shots, you can tell if you are gonna get it or not by your initial velocity and angle, you can basically reset after 1s if you know what it should look like. And not everyone is grinding for world record, most people who speedrun this game will never get world record, that's just the reality of speedrunning. For those people, breaking personal bests can be much more rewarding, and focusing on self improvement.

Also look at Golf It speedrunners in the middle of the pack: the difference in this game for Grassland between 1st and 10th is ~70 seconds. You can certainly be on pace with World Record, get off rhythm on a hole, and hit the 12 stroke limit, when if you were to land the shot on the 17th attempt (as an example), you'd have burned up a lot less than 70 seconds retrying it. So instead of going from WR pace to "throw your run away, haha, you hit 12 strokes, try again" you could at least land a run that still could theoretically be the new 7th place.

If you want the WR for Golf It, even with 12 stroke limits, you should take the highest risk + highest reward strategy. The 12 stroke limit doesn't stop you, it just honestly wastes your time. And the theoretical perfect run will always be under 12 strokes, so if that rule is set to 12, or 50, or 100, it won't change what the best run possible would be. It just makes it more forgiving for people still learning various tricks.

Djodjino also makes a great point about speedrun races, those are scenarios where requiring a hard reset just kills the fun.

"I think Jaychalke (who set up the initial rules) wanted to ensure everyone runs with the exact same conditions."

The "exact same conditions" has flaws, I think that's the wrong way to look at making a category. For example, mouse sensitivity is different for many but that doesn't give an advantage. So is resolution, computer hardware, FPS, operating system. I don't think the goal should be "exact same conditions", there would be a million categories then.

I think the goal should be "to make things fair". It's not fair to use macros for example ( a common rule in speedrunning ), or compare times from a run on easy difficulty to a run on a harder difficulty runs (another common category split ), but is it really unfair to let someone finish their run and submit it, even if they need 15 strokes to make a shot? They are already being punished on time, punishing them with a forced reset is really salt in the wounds at that point.

It's not the same, but I'd like you to imagine a scenario where runs with bad RNG (Golf It doesn't have that exact problem, but other games do) were banned from submission, because they should "reset for the whole run anyway, since it wasted too much time". And what happens if the run wasn't actually so bad that it wouldn't bump them up on the leader-boards a rank or two (instead of getting WR due to the time loss)?

I know this thread is old, but I really hope you can reconsider changing the rules again. Thank you if you read that huge wall of text, I know I rambled a little.